January 15, 2013

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke's Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film's place within the German-Austrian taskmaster's oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders--in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It's no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke's
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent--sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it's difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke's Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who--far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators--recall a
bygone era of French cinema.

If
there's a double-irony in the fact that both Trintignant and Riva are instantly
recognizable as themselves in Amour, it's that
throughout their careers they've often embodied types more than individuals.
They've served, for example, as the quintessential naive boy-scout
and provincial maid in their early films and as older, more tortured versions of
the same in the chapters that bookend Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois couleurs trilogy, whose ironic casting suggests a blueprint
for Haneke. With the James Quandt-programmed retrospective A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and
Emmanuelle Riva, TIFF honours both the universality of their
performances and the particular corporeal stamp Trintignant and Riva put on a
film like Amour. Indeed, for all its dependence on archetypes
to deliver the bruising force of the titular love affair between two shut-ins
closer than parent and child, Amour no doubt strikes
some as uncharacteristically warm, even personal, because we know Trintignant's raised eyebrow and Riva's far-off gaze.

We
don't typically think of actors when we talk about auteurism, but as Quandt's
selection shows, Trintignant is a performer who brings a certain cache with him
across his body of work, and as such has long galvanized directors into casting him either to or against type. There's a remarkable consistency to the way
he's used by filmmakers as disparate as Roger Vadim and Eric Rohmer as a
strident sort of dandy, even if Rohmer's My Night at Maud's allows his Catholic mensch more shades than the
puppy desperately lapping at Brigitte Bardot's heels in ...And God Created Woman. Trintignant's borderline-lost quality in these films--the implication in his furrowed brow that he's always just a step away
from slipping out of his composure, even behind dark sunglasses--is picked up
and refined by Costa-Gavras and Bernardo Bertolucci, who in Z and The
Conformist,
respectively, find something paranoiac in his steely good looks that prefigures
Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.

While Haneke claims to have written Amour specifically for
Trintignant, it's his casting of Riva that relies most on the actor's already-established image for the movie's haunted quality. Rather like Naomi Watts, alongside
whom she is currently nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, Riva has often been
called upon to embody suffering saints, most memorably in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapò, where she plays a delicate political prisoner who is
spiritually broken in a concentration camp. Her tragic end in Kapò, in a tracking shot famously blasted by Jacques
Rivette as the epitome of tastelessness, is as iconic as they come, but the
more apt thematic touchstone for her work in Amour is surely Alain Resnais's
not-insignificantly-titled Hiroshima
mon amour, as the unnamed French actress scarred by her punishment for taking up with a German soldier in the closing days of the war.

Kieslowski revisited
that performance in Blue, casting Riva as
Binoche's Alzheimer's-diagnosed mother, her illness either a cosmic comeuppance
or a gift granted to make up for her insistence in the Resnais film that she
remembers everything, even the national trauma that, as her Japanese
lover reminds her, does not belong to her. In the last act of Haneke's
revision, as in Kieslowski's, Riva's face becomes an inscrutable mask on which
other characters try to glean the past--an act Anne herself undergoes in her
final moment of lucidity: a photo-album reminiscence session that ends with her
half-ironically celebrating the joys of a "long life." She might be yet another
of Haneke's Annes, then, the latest glutton for his punishment, but the girl
she glimpses in those photos, and the woman Trintignant comes to scan for signs
of life thereafter, is undoubtedly the Riva we know from other films.